Communal Violence in Poso, Central Sulawesi 47
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C ommunal V iolence in Poso, C entral Sulawesi: W here People Eat Fish A nd Fish Eat People Lorraine V. Aragon' Tales of Conflict, Politics of Division In July 2000,1 traveled on a crowded bus south from Central Sulawesi's Muslim- majority capital, Palu, to the Protestant-majority highlands. Protestant and Muslim passengers around me, previously strangers, chatted about the reprehensibility of the violence occurring just two hundred kilometers east in Poso. A Muslim elder on the bus concluded the conversation by saying, "In Palu people eat fish, but in Poso fish eat people" ("Di Palu orang makan ikan tapi di Poso ikan makan orang"). Afterwards, my Protestant companions discussed the phrase. In Palu, things were still good, with people eating the best of all foods, fish. In Poso, things were reversed and unnatural: the corpses of victims had been tossed in the river, their fate to be a meal for fish. It was said that fisherman, while gutting fish from the Gulf of Tomini, north of Poso, had discovered severed hands wearing golden rings. 1 1 am grateful to many who shared data related to Poso, including Greg Acciaioli, Timothy Babcock, Jafar Bua, Betty Chandra, Elizabeth Coville, Clark Cunningham, Kevin Evans, Sundjaya, Sidney Jones, Celia Lowe, John MacDougall, Michael Martens, Andrea Molnar, Oren Murphy, Rusli Pasau, David Rohde, Albert Schrauwers, and Esther Veldhoen. I am further indebted to Greg Acciaioli, Robert Hefner, Sidney Jones, David Rohde, and Albert Schrauwers for comments on an early draft, and to Ben Anderson and Deborah Homsher for extensive substantive and editorial suggestions. I also thank conflict symposium colleagues, including Gene Ammarell, Jacques Bertrand, Elizabeth Collins, Robert Hefner, Octovianus Mote, Nancy Peluso, Imam Prasodjo, and Danilyn Rutherford. Indonesia 72 (October 2001) 46 Lorraine V. Aragon Figure 1. Map of Sulawesi Communal Violence in Poso, Central Sulawesi 47 Communal violence between Muslims and Protestants began in the eastern Central Sulawesi town of Poso during late December 1998 (Phase One) and recurred in April 2000 (Phase Two). The fighting escalated to civil war conditions throughout the regency (kabupaten) in May 2000 (Phase Three). Beginning in April and continuing to the present (August 2001), arson, vehicle, and neighborhood attacks, as well as masked murders, have rebounded (Phase Four). By the end of what is known as Phase Three (May-July 2000), hundreds of people were seriously injured, from three hundred to eight hundred were killed, and nearly 150 corpses had been burned, decapitated, and dumped into the Poso River or other mass graves. At least 3,500 houses, two schools, and nine places of worship were destroyed in twenty towns. More than seventy thousand persons fled their homes. By July 2000, Poso was virtually empty, referred to as a dead city (kota mati). The animosity between certain Protestant and Muslim groups in Poso took its particularly violent form under shifting state and military policies. Regency-level political struggles developed in an atmosphere charged with legal turpitude, weak journalism, and incitement by some religious leaders on both sides. As conditions worsened, segments of Poso's Muslim and Protestant communities began to respond to any perceived assault with a pattern of multiplied revenge; not tit for tat, not just explosive anger, but the idea that an extra wallop or calculated punishment was required in the vindictive act. "Our cousin was knifed, so we bum your town. You burned our houses, so we ambush hundreds from your community, kill them, and cut them into pieces." This increasingly calculated retribution pattern gradually became portrayed and justified in vaguely scriptural terms. Why did such violence between religious communities in Poso suddenly surge only months after the resignation of President Suharto in May 1998? Why did the violence recur and escalate over a period of nearly three years (thus far), remaining unchecked by local and national authorities? And why were Protestants and Muslims who lived only a half day's drive away in western Central Sulawesi still able to remain friendly and communicative, albeit apprehensive, despite the nearby conflicts and a mounting burden of Poso refugees? Somehow religion interacted with Poso Regency's economic and political structure in a destructive way linked to Indonesia's broader national and international problems. It bears noting, however, that this fight is not about religious doctrines or practices, but about the political economy of being Protestant (or Catholic) and Muslim. Answers to the three questions above reside in the congruence of peculiar Indonesian state conditions and Poso Regency's competing "religious" collectivities, which are based historically on certain types of land and human allegiance claims. Below I first discuss state issues, regional religious history, legal and demographic shifts, and Poso's 1998-1999 regent competition. Then I detail the conflict phases, explore religious rationales, and finally begin to analyze patron-client links that mark a geographic path from the initial urban to the ensuing rural violence. Although the analysis begins with the inextricable context of the state, the intent of this essay is to redirect consideration of Indonesia's political reformation problems so that more attention is focused on the state's interaction with grassroots conditions of outer island regions. It is there where many comparable battles between Indonesia's 48 Lorraine V. Aragon "indigenous" or homeland communities and the migrant or diaspora communities are being fought. Contemporary State Problems and Ethnonationalist Conflicts The 1997 Asian financial crisis had an especially deep impact on Indonesia because of the country's grossly mismanaged banking industry, which worked with the corrupt and nepotistic monopolies set up by the Suharto regime.2 Recognition of the Suharto family's role in the economic crisis, along with increasing popular pressure for democratic reforms, led to Suharto's ouster in May 1998. In the following months of former Vice-president B. J. Habibie's presidency, riots characterized as ethnic or religious attacks occurred in Waikabubak, West Sumba; Ketapang, Jakarta; Kupang, West Timor; Makassar, South Sulawesi; and Banyuwangi, East Java; these are just a few of the clashes that immediately preceded Poso's. The December 1998 rioting in Poso, in turn, was overshadowed by even greater violence in Ambon, Maluku that began two weeks later. During roughly the same time period, Jakarta responded to popular demands for regional autonomy with regional redistricting and laws portending to shift far more control over funds from national and even provincial levels to the regency (kabupaten) level.3 As a result of this political transformation, competitions for regency administrative posts now involved higher stakes, and election campaigns became open grounds for communal mobilization in several areas, including Poso.4 That the Poso election struggles ultimately coalesced around religious (Protestant, or even Christian, versus Muslim) rather than merely ethnic (Pamona versus Bugis and Javanese) factions, widened the scale of the conflict and signifies the power of twentieth-century transnational influences on the outer islands' economic and religious constellations. The rapid succession of violent communal conflicts just before and after Suharto's resignation variously suggested top-down models of broad-based conspiracies, or bottom-up models of flawed democratization. According to such models, outbursts of violence in Indonesia either are engineered by national elites stirring up trouble that will require suppression by an authoritarian state, or the outbursts are viewed as the result of liberating democratic reforms (Reformasi) gone awry, descending into lawlessness. In these basic forms, neither model addresses the accumulated resentments and subtle realignments of ethnic, religious, and economic consciousness that have developed over 2 See Shalendra D. Sharma, "The Indonesian Financial Crisis: From Banking Crisis to Financial Sector Reforms, 1997-2000," Indonesia 71 (April 2001): 79-110; also, Mark McGillivray and Oliver Morrissey, "Economic and Financial Meltdown in Indonesia: Prospects for Sustained and Equitable Economic and Social Recovery," in Reformasi: Crisis and Change in Indonesia, ed. Arief Budiman, Barbara Hatley, and Damien Kingsbury (Clayton: Monash Asia Institute, 1999), pp. 3-26. 3 These are the 1999 Regional Autonomy Laws (No. 22,25,28) passed during Habibie's one-and-a-half year term. See Undang-Undang Otonomi Daerah 1999 (Bandung: Kuraiko Pratama, 1999). 4 On regency election wrangling in Sumba, Central Kalimantan, and Maluku respectively, see Jacqueline Vel, "Tribal Battle in a Remote Island: How District Leaders in Sumba (Eastern Indonesia) Combat the Fading of Their Authority," in this issue; Human Rights Watch, "Indonesia: The Violence in Central Kalimantan (Borneo)," February 28, 2001; Gerry van Klinken, "The Maluku Wars: Bringing Society Back In," Indonesia 71 (April 2001): 1-26, esp. 21. Communal Violence in Poso, Central Sulawesi 49 long periods of time in numerous Indonesian provinces. They also miss the way that precolonial communal ties to land, indigenous hierarchies, and religious separatism in the twentieth century have interacted with contemporary squabbles among elites and their followers for regional power, a scramble fomented by the economic and civic institutional weakness of the post-Suharto state.